(1887-1914) Nationality: German Activity: Painter Average rate: Between $ 150,000 and 1,200,000 August Macke was considered as one of the major German Expressionist artists whose career however ended tragically less than two months after the outbreak of the First World War.
Macke was a true link between Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism and had much influence over Paul Klee.
He spent his youth in the Rhine region between Cologne, Düsseldorf and Bonn. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf between 1904 and 1906 and travelled to Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium and France.
Macke was first influenced by Böcklin and Hodler before his first trip to Paris in 1907 and where he was much impressed by Renoir. On his return, he went to Berlin where he studied under Lovis Corinth until 1908. The same year he went back to Paris with the task of buying French modern paintings for Bernhard Koehler, an industrialist. He thus acquired for the latter many Impressionist works as well as two paintings by Seurat, whom he was discovering at the same time.
Macke then worked under the influence of Seurat, as seen in his «Sunny Garden» of 1908 and was enlisted in the German Army that same year. He returned to Paris in 1909 and settled in Bavaria, where he painted landscapes, figures and still lifes giving more simplified forms to his works to which he applied crude colours.
The Matisse exhibition held in 1910 in Munich led him to develop his new Expressionist touch, which he had already perfected in the company of Frans Marc, whom he had met the previous year. Macke also met Kandinsky, Klee and other members of the «Blaue Reiter» movement with whom he exhibited his works in 1911 and 1912.
Macke visited Paris again in 1912, this time with Marc, and met le Fauconnier and Delaunay from whom he borrowed the principle of simultaneous contrasts and which made him stress that his aim was to find the spatial energies of colours rather than to be content with life-less chiaroscuro.
Macke started to apply pure colours on the canvas from 1907 and found a new technique in applying Delaunay's simultaneous chromatic principles. He lived for a while in Hilterfingen until 1914 and produced some abstract paintings before travelling to Tunisia with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet, a Swiss artist.
Such trip had a tremendous influence over Klee but offered no prospects for Macke who was drafted again in the army on his return and was killed in combat on September 26th 1914 in the Champagne region.
One can easily believe that Macke would have become a greater artist if he had had the opportunity to survive the war though other painters who managed to do so were so much affected by the scars of the conflict that they gave up their avant-garde touch and worked in a classic way. Still he produced some magnificent works and is considered nowadays as one of the most important representatives of German Expressionism.
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